I am working on an iterative analysis that uses orthologous pipelines that require mpileup.txt files as input for a visualization step. This requires me to convert VCF files to mpileup.txt.
This experiment uses error-prone-pcr and follows a somatic variant discovery workflow that was designed by a 3rd party. I have written and implemented several orthologous pipelines with small differences from the original workflow in order to produce a truth set (variants identified consistently by all of the pipelines). The 3rd party used a workflow that calls Samtools to produce mpileup.txt files as the final output and necessitated the development of a custom visualization script. My orthologous pipelines use mutect2 to produce vcf files that need to be compared to the mpileup.txt files.
If I could convert my vcf files to mpileup.txt files without loss of information it would save me significant time cost associated with writing a similar visualization script for vcf files and prevent bias involved in converting the 3rd parties output to vcf format. There are plenty of examples for using samtools and bcftools to produce an intermediate mpileup file that is then converted to a finalized fitered vcf file. But I can't find much direction for converting a vcf file to an mpileup. Can anybody provide direction for this task?